JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Past research has found that people with dementia are searching for digital dementia information in peer-reviewed medical research articles, dementia advocacy and medical organizations, and blogs written by other people with dementia. This past work has also demonstrated that people with dementia do not perceive digital dementia information to be emotionally or cognitively accessible.

Objective:

In this study, we sought to investigate the readability, linguistic psychological and emotional characteristics, and target audiences of digital dementia information. We conducted a textual analysis of three different types of text-based dementia information, 300 medical articles, 35 websites, and 50 blogs.

Methods:

We assessed the text readability using the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch Kincaid Grade Level measurements, as well as the tone, analytical thinking, clout, authenticity and word frequencies with a natural language processing tool: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Generator. We also conducted a thematic analysis to categorize the target audiences for each information source and used these categorizations for further statistical analysis.

Results:

The median Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level readability score for all types of information (N=1139) was 12.1, and the median Flesch Reading Ease score was 38.6, revealing that the readability scores of all three information types were higher than the minimum requirement (7th-8th grade level and 50-70). We found that medical articles had significantly higher word count and analytical thinking scores as well as significantly lower clout, authenticity, and emotional tone scores than websites and blogs. Further, blogs had significantly higher word count and authenticity scores but lower analytical scores than websites. Using thematic analysis, we found that the majority of the blogs (156/227) and websites (399/612) were targeted at people with dementia. Website information targeted towards a general audience had significantly lower readability scores. Additionally, website information targeting people with dementia had higher word count and lower emotional tone ratings. The information on websites targeting caregivers had significantly higher clout and lower authenticity scores.

Conclusions:

Our findings indicate there is an abundance of digital dementia information available and targeted towards people with dementia, but this information is not readable by a general audience. This is problematic when considering that people with less than 12 years of education are at a higher risk of developing dementia. We suggest dementia digital content creators’ lower readability scores to be more accessible to a general audience. Further, our findings demonstrate digital dementia information has a negative tone, which may be a contributing factor to the mental health crisis many people with dementia face after receiving a diagnosis. Therefore, we call for content creators to focus efforts on providing information in a way that does not perpetuate the overly negative narrative surrounding dementia.